Chapter 3-1
2030 Words
The civilians were dancing on the train again, their feet stomping to the heartbeat of the engine. Forced to sway to the rhythm by the movement of the train, Deacon crushed a sunflower seed between his thumb and index finger. An old woman seated across the aisle fanned herself with a handful of reeds. She glared openly at him.
“b****y inspections,” she muttered to her daughter-in-law, whose head was bowed in respect and submission to her elder. “Isn’t enough the factory’s going to be shut down, but they sent a djinn to do it? Bad manners. Bad luck.”
She spoke Usu, a working-class language, and one that Deacon had been punished for learning. It was the one part of him the conditioning couldn’t reprogram—language. He betrayed no indication that he understood, but kept himself busy with the sunflower seeds he had bought at the city-station.
He wasn’t like these people. He didn’t dress in the body-hugging fashions, and if his loose black clothing didn’t set him apart, his pale skin and gray eyes certainly did. He hated his eyes, the mark of his inhuman origin. He knew how flat they looked, shallow and artificial.
It had been the first mark of his insanity. Engineered humans didn’t have opinions on physical appearance. Deacon wasn’t even sure when his madness began. Conditioning should have scrubbed his self-awareness away.
He crushed another seed, rubbing it into a prickly paste.
The passengers stomped their feet down harder. The whole carriage rocked with the frenzy of their excitement. How could something that moved so slowly be so loud? He listened idly to the life around him, pretending to be immersed in the shine of his own black shoes.
The old woman was still complaining about his presence. “It should be on one of the Sand-Beetles. It’s not right they put it here, with us.”
Ah. She took pleasure in misusing the Usu pronouns, neutering him with language. The cruelty of it stung more than her ill-informed slurs about his job, or his origin. The factory wasn’t his destination. His journey would take him to the desert. The factory was just a stop along the way.
He had begged carefully for this assignment. Traded contracts with other Inspectors and negotiated with the Administration. Not once did he let them know he wanted this. Wanting wasn’t allowed to his kind.
When he closed his eyes, he could see the endless sand, and himself, walking against the wind with his slim, empty briefcase. The sun would beat down on his skin, turning it from pale to b****y, raw, red. But the pain would be nothing. The starvation and dehydration, he would barely notice. It was a walk in the sunshine compared to the re-conditioning he would face if he returned to headquarters and confessed his malfunction. Again, another symptom of his insanity: He did not want to be conditioned. The pain. The illness. The invasion.
With great effort, he turned his attention away from his madness to the gossip in the cabin. This carriage held a fragment of a wedding party meeting up in the mountains, readying themselves for negotiations and introductions to new family members. What could they offer? What would they accept?
The best stories were shared in families. Remember when mama washed the floor with papa’s best bottle of kashaka? It peeled holes in the linoleum and she was drunk just off the fumes! Remember when Eliza wanted that boy from the—
“Cheap!” a young voice engaged him in the Official language, tearing him from the gossip about people he didn’t know and would never meet. Deacon raised his eyes to find a young boy, only eight or nine, holding out a bouquet of wilting flowers. Stubbornness prematurely aged the boy’s face. He shook the flowers insistently. “Cheap!” he repeated.
“Come away from him!” the old woman called out in Usu. “Didn’t your mother teach you not to speak to ghosts?”
The boy turned to her. “Then will you buy them, grandmother?” he asked in the same language. “If you had the credit, you would spend it on skin-cream.”
Her lips ballooned out and her eyebrows descended sharply. From kindly matron to formidable matriarch, the change was fluid, immediate, and well practiced. “You speak to elders like that, you little bastard?”
This theater interfered with the natural rhythm of the train now. People strained their necks and backs to see the scene unfold, deciding on which side they would take. The ecosystem changed, the feet stomping out the dance around their vehicle seemed to rise to a frenzy, though Deacon knew it echoed only in his mind.
He hated confrontation. Another symptom of his madness. The desert, remember the desert. It waited. Calm. Empty. Silent.
“How much?” he asked in Official, trusting that the boy knew that much of his language at least.
The boy glanced back, surprised. “Cheap!” he repeated.
“How much?” Deacon waved a blank chip at him, its denomination waiting to be determined.
“Thirty,” the boy said.
A Smokeless and Scorching Fire by Kyna Tek
An outrageous price. But Deacon was rich. Beyond rich. He had the wealth of the Administration at his fingertips, and what else would a djinn spend it on? Around him, his traveling company quieted. Intent on the transaction.
He tapped the amount into the chip, and gave it to the boy who promptly pushed it through the scanner hung around his neck while Deacon tried to select a flower. They were all exquisitely ugly, drooping in the heat.
To his surprise the boy shoved the now-blank chip as well as the whole bouquet onto his chest. Deacon barely had time to clasp his hands around the bundle of stems before the boy raced away down the compartment, dodging the frenzied dancers.
The old woman attempted to trip the boy with her cane, but he jumped lithely over this obstacle and the carriage door closed behind him.
Deacon felt rather foolish now, with his bundle of crushed flowers. They smelled like fried food and sickly perfume. He turned this unexpected purchase around in his hands, exploring the strangeness of it. Native plants certainly, by the waxy leaves and spiny petals. Water-efficient traits.
Would there be greenery then, scattered in the sands? He hadn’t imagined that.
And the sounds began again. The women muttering about the upcoming celebrations, the wealth sure to be on display. The men grumbling out stories and opinions to anyone who would listen. Deacon felt the thick leaves between his thumb and forefinger. Barely sixteen breaths passed before the door slid open again, slamming against the frame as a burly man burst into their midst. Big and square. Brown. Muscled and scarred from hard labor. His face creased with unkindness.
He scanned the gathering.
“Where’s the boy?” he asked the rest of the car in Usu. Nobody answered, just stared at him. Even the old lady’s lips tightened. Information was notoriously hard to get out of the working class, but a question required truth from an Inspector. Deacon considered fighting the conditioning to keep silent, but even as resistance strayed through his thoughts, his stomach began to roil, and the phantom daggers of pain began to dig through his scalp.
Lying, even by omission, was not worth the pain. He needed to save his strength. “He went that way,” Deacon said, pointing to the door the boy had left through.
But the man caught sight of the flowers in Deacon’s hands. He gestured rudely toward them. “Stolen. Take.” His Official sounded even worse than the little thief’s. Official was a clean language, free from the guttural inflections he clipped into the syllables.
Shrugging, Deacon held out the flowers, but the old woman interfered again. “He’s an Inspector, you fool. He’s already paid for them.”
The stranger scowled, and took a step forward to see Deacon clearly. Behind him, a woman appeared in the cabin’s open doorway. She surveyed the crowded carriage with disinterest and distaste.
But she captured everyone else. Even the presence of the loud, aggressive man faded beside her.
Her dark hair was bound in plaits by copper wire, and caught by tiny leaves forged from gold. Each strand glimmered with hints of red henna. She swayed hypnotically to the beat of the train, seeming to slow even its frantic pace.
She wore a bride’s veil that hooked over her ears and the bridge of her nose, but the sheer fabric did nothing to hide her face.
It served as only a token attempt at modesty.
“Don’t look at her,” the old woman muttered to her daughter-in-law, loud enough to warn everyone in the cabin. “That’s Mahati’s woman.”
Mahati’s woman stood no taller than Deacon, but she stood with a dignity that gave the impression of height. She wore a dress of intricate chainmail, links of silver wire and drops of metal bead that rippled with a delicate sound when she moved. A light cotton shift kept the metal off her skin and accented the extreme contours of her body.
None of this caught his attention more than her eyes.
Elaborately outlined with kohl, they found him immediately. An expression of understanding, of some deep communication, gleamed in those eyes when she fixed her gaze on him.
She walked forward, past the man who said something to try and stop her progress. She brushed him off like a safari fly and sat beside Deacon.
“What use does a ghost have for flowers?” Mahati’s woman asked, her husky voice lending an exotic lilt to her Official.
“What use does anyone have for flowers?” he returned flatly.
She laughed, as if he had said something funny. He tracked the arch of her jaw, calculating the slope of her neck. She was a creature of pure mathematics. To anyone else she might have been beautiful, but he had not yet lost that much of his sanity.
And he remembered the desert. In the sand, his flesh would be stripped away by the winds, ravaged by sand-beasts who wouldn’t care that he had been engineered.
“Take them,” he said, thrusting the bouquet out to her. “I don’t know why I bought them. I didn’t know they were stolen.”
She hesitated, her eyes traveling to his face.
“Don’t you dare, Axeonos,” her companion said sharply, but he made no move toward Deacon. He feared the djinn as well, it seemed.
She took the bouquet. In these crowded quarters, with the afternoon sun still glaring through the windows, sweat shone on everyone’s skin.
But not hers. In the first-class carriages, the heat never made it past the doors. Her cold fingers brushed against his skin as she withdrew the bundle of waxy leaves.
Immediately silence engulfed their fellow travelers. Deacon gazed around at their audience, and followed their attention back in time to see the man’s face darken with anger. The woman relaxed against the bench, and through her gently shifting veil Deacon could see a dangerous smile, badly-hidden triumph.
The man started to shout, not in Usu or Official, but some derivation of a mountain language.
“Is something wrong?” Deacon asked the woman.
“Nothing at all, alma-ami,” she said sweetly, taking his hand in her own.
My Soul. The endearment was stressed. He tried to pull his hand away, but she didn’t let go. “What is wrong?” he asked the still-silent train.
The grandmother who insulted him answered for the crowd. “Bond-flowers,” she said. “Your woman now.”
Between her broken Official, the now iridescent anger of the strange man, and the woman’s hand still encasing his own, he understood. A local marriage ritual.
The desert was slipping away from his grasp. His masters would learn of this. He would have to report this. There would be an investigation. They would catch him and recondition him.
- Writer
